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The Campfire Headphase

Boards of Canada

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Customer Reviews

The Real “Dawn Chorus”
     

On Boards of Canada’s previous album, “Geogaddi,” a track is titled “Dawn Chorus,” featuring wailing vocal samples over a driving beat and a scratchy synthesizer loop. This type of dusty sound is advanced in this new BoC album, but whereas there was a sinister element of evil beneath the puzzles of “Geogaddi,” “The Campfire Headphase” means nothing more than to be an hour of tranquility and introspection, without voices of fear to pull at your emotions. While Boards return with the pastoral ambient tone that we’ve grown to love, Marcus and Michael have apparently decided to switch gears with their musical sound. They have removed many of the drowned-out vocal samples and in their place is a strumming guitar, an instrument nearly absent from all their previous recordings, into their stew of electronic folk. Whether this artistic direction appeals to you is up to your discretion—personally, I think it sounds beautiful and I’d love to see how this concept develops. The sound of this album isn’t too far off from their earlier “Twoism” EP, only the “temperature” of the musical tone is now less like a cool evening and more like a warm sunrise. While not quite as prolific as “Geogaddi”, “Campfire” is another masterpiece from BoC. Clearly, the album as a whole is not meant to be deciphered and analyzed like the mysterious and dark segments of “Geogaddi,” with its masked samples and curious track lengths. Rather, this is an album that yearns for brightness, calm and clarity. Indeed, one of the tracks on the album is titled “A Moment of Clarity.” Where “Geogaddi” was the frightened soundtrack to the unholy hour of 3 a.m. (a recommended hour for listening), “The Campfire Headphase” is the soundtrack to 6 a.m.—the hour of dawn and a positive beginning to a new day.

More Magnificent Daydreaming
     

It’s like viewing still images from an attic. Dust comes off the photograph and you project the place and time as though it had been your own. That ephemeral moment expands to a pool of memories, all feigned but it doesn’t matter that none of this happened. Instinctively making up a story with pictures that you never saw from an attic storage bin that doesn’t exists continues. At some moment your own memories of people seamlessly splice into this fiction and you slightly start to wonder if these series of thoughts are indeed from your own past. Eventually you have to ask yourself how much of this was spontaneously written in your head or how much did you intercept it from something out there. Boards of Canada have made another fantastic soundtrack for magnificent daydreaming. The final moments drip you either further into a dream or dissolves you back to reality with strong impressions of the daydream that just passed through your mind. The still life fragrance of this record will wash through the rest of the day. Press track one and let it happen.

Ambient at its very best
     

Boards of Canada acheives what very few ambient artists ever come close to: beautiful, unique melodies hidden amoungst fantastic detail. Music has the Right to Children caught my ear six years ago and i've been listening ever since. The Campfire Headphase brings Boards of Canda back where they belong; at the forefront of their genre. Oscar See Through Red Eye, if not the entire album, should make it into your library.

Biography

Formed: 1996 in Scotland

Genre: Electronic

Years Active: '90s, '00s

Boards of Canada are the duo of Michael Sandison (born July 14, 1971) and Marcus Eoin (born May 27, 1973). Based on the northern coast of Scotland, the group got its start on acclaimed experimental electronica label Skam in 1996 after recording an obscene number of tracks and pressing the best of them up as a miniscule-run 12", Twoism, an eight-track promo EP the group sent to labels in lieu of a demonstration tape. The pair's first official release appeared on Skam toward the middle of 1996, and...
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